A Thousand Plateaus

when i was writing to paula yesterday night i realized that i don't fall in love easily. at least compared to other people, such as blane. he's lost his heart every other week to someone else. and i don't want to imply that he's of the shallow or superficial kind – quite the contrary. and still he has this amazing gift to fall in love by the blink of an eye. this simply doesn't happen to me. i'm meeting quite a lot of intelligent, young and attractive people each day, plus all the students in my seminar. and still i can count on my five fingers the times i have been in love. i wonder why this is. is it some kind of 'natural' [however ambiguous this word might be] precondition that i have? or is it that i'm not open enough? in fact now that i think about it, i guess there are more people who were in love with me than i was in love with other people.

random lines from cohen's book become more and more prophetic: "it was years and years ago that F. said: Each day you get lonelier..." and now it's a gray saturday afternoon, and i'm surprised about how miserable i'm feeling. i thought i had developed a strategy do deal with all this. fat chance! being reminded of the mere fact that she exists troubles me unreasonably. thank god eva was there. she was a kind of anti-serum, and i guess if i hadn't met s. i'd never had the nerve to kiss her.
 
well, i'm sure i'll brighten up in no time, but this experience will teach me to be even more careful where i'm going and who i might meet there. but i have these persistent flashes of memory of her, like subliminal messages inserted into a strip of film, one each 24 images. her eyes, her voice, her smell, and most of all, her body, for which i'm longing without repetition, without wearing out, always anew. and right now the eurythmics' "here comes the rain again" starts playing "falling on my head like a memory". boy, boogie street is a tiresome place to be. i'm sighing so heavily that my breath creates little round waves that travel across the puddles on the sidewalk smoothly. here's the prevalent feeling: i love. but there's no object (or subject for that matter) to attach this love to, while it is bouncing off from others. it's free flowing, non-directional, traveling into the world. the question is whether it will return to me. the question is whether this is not the best love of all.

i had even rehearsed for that moment. funny how things are totally different when they actually happen. it's about three in the morning and i've just walked back from the friesenplatz to my place. it didn't rain and it's a surprisingly warm night, so i decided not to take the underground and instead walk and listen to leonard's cohen's "boogie street", one of my favorite songs during the past couple of weeks.

"and oh my love, i still recall
the pleasures that we knew
the rivers and the waterfalls
wherein i bathed with you
bewildered by your beauty
i kneeled to dry your feet
by such instructions you prepared
a man for boogie street"

first we were at the 'westpol' - sirka (who is leaving for new york tomorrow), eva, their friend jan, i and a couple of other people i did not know. when i wanted to go to the men's room i tried to find a way through the crowded bar. and then i first recognized her friend from work. i had met him at the university a couple of times. i saw the face and it took me some seconds until i realized who he was. and then i saw her. i had even rehearsed for that moment. i had sworn to myself to simply cast a luscious, flirtatious look, the kind of look i would give a girl like her who is sitting across a room (if i'm drunk enough). funny how things turn out to be so much different when they actually happen.

after i knew who the guy was, i saw her. only her back. only a black t-shirt and long blond hair flowing down her back. i instantly froze and turned around. believe it or not, it was only this afternoon that i thought how strange it was that i haven't met her by accident yet. because cologne isn't that big. i walked back to the group of people i was with, sat down, fingered the ring on my finger that i'm not wearing and smoked one of sirka's cigarettes. i think i'm glad i only saw her back. she's a kind of medusa, and not looking into her eyes probably saved my life tonight.

sirka noticed what had happened. or she sensed it. or whatever. she inconspicuously suggested that we might leave and go somewhere else, which we did. we ended up in the 'blue note' which had a new name that i can't remember. i was sitting opposite to eva. and there were three or four moments when our looks met and we both laughed and smiled and i didn't know where to look at. she sort of blushed, her eyes flickering, challenging. i think i tried not to glance over to her too often. then she said: "i've got to go now" and i hurried to get my jacket, joined her and walked her to the underground station. when we parted she stood in front of me, hugged me and said: "sleep well" and i thought: 'oh crown of light. oh darkened one. i never thought we'd meet. i will never again walk home regretfully. i will never again miss a chance because i didn't dare to move.' so i said: "will i risk a slap in the face if i kissed you now?" and she said: "hm, no..." so we kissed. you kiss my lips and then it's done and i'm back, back on boogie street. but hers was a kiss with a small 'k'. a kiss with an 'f' for friendly. or maybe with an 's' for surprised or an 'i' for insecure. it wasn't the kind of kiss i had been hoping for. but i'm not quite sure what reason i had to expect such a kiss in the first place. after all we had spoken a good deal of the night about her boyfriend in the states.

"so come my friends, be not afraid
we are so lightly here
it is in love that we are made
in love we disappear.
though all the maps of blood and flesh
are posted on the door
there's no one who has told us yet
what boogie street is for..."

so i walked home alone, listening to leonard's wise, sad and relaxed voice. and i wrote this down. and while i'm writing this i get a message from leah, and she's asking me: "have you obtained a copy of l.c's new book of poetry (book of longing) yet?" which i hadn't and which i ordered at amazon right away. so, it's all falling into place after all. is this a kind of consolation? maybe. it's 3:24 now and in the distance i can hear the trains pass by. i'm wondering what she is thinking. i'm wondering why my heart sometimes feels so brittle and dried out when all these songs, words and music swash over me like water over a dam that breaks.

"...i'm what i am
and what i am
is back on boogie street..."

"Even if she goes away I will say to myself, I have not been denied the full measure of beauty." i'm reading these, cohen's words on may 25, while the sky is populated by heavy rainclouds that pace across the horizon. schools of fish. herds of fluffy buffaloes driven by the wind. i think i'm waiting for the rain. i think i've always been waiting for the rain. "I will say to myself, I have not been denied the full measure of beauty." Leonard, what's that supposed to be? a comfort? a charme? the logic of the sentence only works with the future tense in the first half-sentence. present-ly it turns bitter and is just a bad excuse for a failing that seems to have been implied and anticipated from the very beginning. it is easy to console a future failing, a projected and imagined loss. if trees could walk they'd all roam the parire like the clouds above, instead of being stuck in this churchyard, along this street, on this sidewalk.

the moment i entered the room i realized that i have forgotten the face of the waitress who has invited me for a beer the other night. i looked around at the greeting smiles and i knew that i could not recall what she looks like, what her voice sounds like. it's more comic than sad, actually. what a great protagonist i would make for a novel! maybe someone as ignorant just doesn't deserve better. i think i've always waited for the rain.

i say to myself: i have not been denied the full measure of beauty. i don't see how i will ever manage to stand becoming old. no. rather: becoming ugly.

the most amazing thing just happened to me: i was sitting at the café, typing on the ibook and the waitress (whom i have never seen before at the place. i've been there three or four times a week for months now, but i've never seen the two waitresses before who were on duty tonight) came up to my table and brought me another beer and said:

"so, does deleuze talk to you?".

i was stunned. i looked up, thought for a moment, couldn't really make sense of what she said and simply muttered

"what?"

and she repeated:

"does deleuze talk to you? you are working on deleuze, aren't you?"

from where i was sitting it was impossible for her to see what i had been typing so she couldn't have seen the name on the computer-screen.

"äh, what gave it away?" i asked

"can you tell from my appearance?"

and she nodded to the bar and said

"no, the guy over there told me that you do. he knows you from the colloquium..."

and i looked over to the bar and i saw somebody sitting there but i did not recognize him. and we are only about twelve people in the colloquium and i know each one fairly well. he smiled and i smiled and i looked at the waitress and she smiled too and i thought: strange world. now, i'm not really used to talking to people i don't know or who approach me and i was a little taken off the track. anyway, when it was time to pay, i went to the cashpoint and the other waitress gave me the check and said:

"so, you had a tea and a beer. that's 2.90" and i said

"i think i had two beers actually."

"oh no" she answered "one beer goes on the house: christine [the first waitress who was nowhere to be seen at that point] paid for it..."

i was literally speechless and i think i blushed.

"äh, well, äh. it's the first time that something like this happens to me..." i said and she added

"she said it was because you've had so much stress recently..."

so i looked around again to thank christine but she was not there and i just said

"well, please thank her a lot!" and i went, bewildered and confused.

i feel like a charcater in an auster novel!

uneasy sleep. came home at five in the morning from blaine's birthday party, during which i'd been sitting on the sofa next to mary, we both had been sunken into the cushion, sharing a bag of candy, and she was talking to me about her new boyfriend in the states when her voice suddenly disappeared and i thought to myself : 'hm, i would really love to touch her face now. in fact, i would really love to kiss her'. and i looked at her face and into her eyes with the long lashes that opened and closed slowly like a venus flytrap.

while i was copying quotes from the secondary literature for the chapter on beautiful losers i came across a paragraph in which stephen scobie quotes the following passage from cohen's novel, and it came so unexpetcedly and was so beautiful that it literally stunned me:

"O God, I Love So Many Things It Will Take Years To Take Them Away One By One"

and an incredible, infinite love for the world, all the world, every piece of the world surprised me for a split-second, took control, and then was gone again. "a beautiful knowledge of unity". u2's with or without you is coming from the juke-box. and you give your self away and you give your self away and bloody hell, yes, that's what you've got to do: become imperceptible, give your self away, become a remote human possibility on a (bass)line of flight, an underwater guitar. i'll walk home now. it is dark outside and it has rained. the air is clear and cool and a few late birds are singing. walking in the dark by the church that is towering towards the moon and the clouds makes me long for a reterritorializing love affair again. here's what paula has written the other night:

i'm sitting outside on the steps in the backyard. it's 7pm and the nature-sounds are so loud and so beautiful. every birdcall wrecks me, goes backwards and forewards and falls on me, and the sky and all objects are lit up by bird-energy; this is why it gets dark when the birds go to bed. the sun is just a disk heated up from within and so glows, but the birds fly furiously about and churn the layers of the air with their wing-beats and terrific colors.

nothing left to say.

ok – i'd really be interested if anybody of you has an opinion on the may 2nd entry. because i continue to be clueless.

from yesterday:
oh boy – i'm sitting in the beer garden at the rathenauplatz. it is full of children and this is not an image or a metaphor. it really is full of children. there's a playground nearby and the sound and atmosphere is like that at the nonswimmer's pool. i wonder why i'm enjoying it so much. maybe because i don't have to be part of it. middle-class parents between 30 and 40. teachers and bank tellers. wearing designer back-packs and drinking bionade. sigh. i don't know. in the past couple of days life seems to be a real joke to me. well, not a joke. more like in that quotation from moby dick that paula cited in her last mail:

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke."

suddenly it's all-day-t-shirt-weather and everybody's out on the street. and i wish i could enjoy this weather more. but there has been another bloody backlash the other day. i was searching for photos of blane because it's his birthday soon and susanne and conny wanted to make a photo-love-story for him – but this is an entirely different story. anyway, i was incautiously opening the 'my photos' folder and wooooosh there were thumbnails of s. – and i still cannot understand how much even these small, hardly intelligible images affected me so much. they just smashed me in the stomach. i don't get it. i can watch images of annie, i can even meet her and it doesn't affect me. i can browse through full-screen images of jana – and it doesn't affect me except for giving me pieces of memory that taste like candy. but s.' force is still violent. it knocks me off my feet.

susanne said i must stop glorifying her. but it has nothing to do with glorification. it's not HER, it's her type, almost. the legs. the back, the hair. every woman her height and appearance becomes an image of her. no – not an image. becomes an embodiment of her. it's not about some kind of glorification. it's not that i think that she was perfect. or that i want to have another relationship with her. it's about this strange force that she exerts. and this has nothing to do with her as a subject.

i came across a quotation of emerson that cohen was citing (however i couldn't find it yet in the whole of emerson):

"What you are, speaks so loudly that I cannot hear you, that is, Reality speaks so loudly in you that I can't hear what you are saying. I ask you to apply this insight to me. I shall apply it to you. I will always feel what you are more deeply than what you say."

it is what she looks like. what she smells like. what she feels like. reality is shouting at me from within her. you cannot glorify these matters of fact, these states of affairs. she has charm. she has grace. and it is not an imaginary one or made up by me in an attempt to keep clinging to some presumably perfect past.

and, before you say it: i'm not just a horny old guy who is fixed on blond, long-legged women.

so, you may or may not believe my stupidity but here's another story to shake your head over:

laurie's show was called "the end of the moon" and lots of it was related to her two years as being the first (and, as we learned, also the last) "artist in residence at NASA". and after the concert i couldn't really sleep: something worked in me. and as usual i felt the need to communicate this. so on sunday i set down and tried to put it into words, and what came out was a mail to laurie anderson. at her website there is an email address for fan mail, and after hesitating another day i sent it off yesterday evening. and here is what it said:

cologne | april 30, 2006

dear mrs. anderson,

'sometimes i wish i could talk to you in capitals because, you know, they're so BIG...'

i have been an admirer of your work for a long time: you are one of the most talented and inspiring people in this or any other universe. your way of putting joy, beauty and terror into words and music is truly unique and mind blowing. last night, at the philharmonie in cologne, i saw you perform live for the first time, and the event impressed and moved me to such an extend that i decided to write to you.

through my work as a phd student i have recently come to think a lot about the philosophy of gilles deleuze and his understanding of corporeality. deleuze defines a body not by its form or substance, but by its longitude and latitude. the longitude expresses the relations of movement and rest, of speeds and slownesses of particles. the latitude expresses the capabilities of a body to affect and be affected. these abstract concepts have become very real to me last night when i was sitting in the dark, listening to the rumbling, seemingly random ambient noises, to the melodic violin that was stretched and compressed in time and pitch by black boxes, and to your voice that composed and decomposed stories, images, metaphors, dreams, stars. all these sounds were traveling down the longitude and latitude of my body, and they moved and affected me with a frightening and yet joyful intensity.

your voice has this astonishing 'grainy' quality, a force like that of water washing a chiseled rock into a smooth pebble. if it is true that your entire life passes in front of your eyes before you die, and there is a voice-over commentary by an off-screen narrator, then i hope that it will be a voice like yours guiding me going back in time. stop. pause. rewind: "and here is that last cup of coffee that you had. stop. pause. rewind. and here's that day by the river with the sunset and sound of trains in the distance. stop. pause. rewind. and here is your friend who died and how you are writing songs together. stop. pause. rewind. and here's how your lover leaves you, and here is how you meet. stop. pause. rewind. and here is your first bike ride, look out, don't fall, steady now. stop. pause. rewind. and here is your first birthday. stop. pause. rewind. and here's your dad. and here's your mom. and now, i think, you have to go. just keep moving till you reach that white light. keep moving..."

your work is, in the best sense, moving me: not like a wave that lifts up a rock to drop it a few feet closer to the shore, but more like a river that pulls it right into the stream of the current and lets it keep moving. it does not only evoke emotions and ideas, but it makes me want to DO things. it is a deterritorialization, shaking me out of my quiet, comfortable life and sending me along a line of flight. it gives me the restlessness that one needs to write, to compose, to create.

now, i'm not a very sentimental person and i consider myself to be somewhat on the cynical side, but when, at the end of the concert, you were singsaying a line that went something like this: "when the tears are falling from my right eye its because i love you so much. when the tears are falling from my left eye, it's because i can't bear you" i totally lost it: something cracked in my body and my mind simultaneously, and it felt as if all particles of my body, every atom and each electron had been accelerated, vibrating in a molecular dance. my skin was sparkling and something happened at a level that was beyond what is 'me', what is my subjectivity. it went deeper. it affected me on a 'real', material level.

for me, your work is a positive and affirmative force that keeps me moving, making me forever restless, and i owe more to it than i could express even if i COULD talk to you in capitals: it has given me dreams, words, songs and shivers. it is achingly beautiful and so intense that i can hardly bear it in my body or my mind. that's why the tears were falling from my left eye last night. and i just wanted to thank you for that. and should you ever decide to have an "artist in residence at laurie anderson" i will hand in my application immediately.

respectfully,
philipp

and this morning, when i checked my mails, i found this answer and since then i feel a little dazed and confused :-)

From: Brad Hampton

Hi Philipp,

First off, thanks so much for your heartfelt comments on your experience with Laurie's performance of "The End of the Moon" the other night in Köln. I've passed your email on to her.

We  - and Laurie - really appreciate hearing what the audience and individuals are experiencing during her performances and it's really gratifying to read such a well articulated response to her work like yours.

If you ever find yourself in NYC and are looking for a way to spend your time, we're ALWAYS in need of assistance!!

All the best,
Brad
----------------------------
Brad Hampton
Studio Manager
Canal Street Communications/Laurie Anderson Studio
P: 212-431-5674
F: 212-431-7892
Office hours: M,W,F 10am-6pm

go figure! and even though i'm aware that this is probably a standard answer they're sending out to everybody who writes to the management, i found that today is such a day on which life is bloody confusing again.